Elden Ring looks tiny and adorable with ’tilt-shifted’ camera

elden ring is not a lovely game. Literally everything from the wild animal world to the souped-up Starscourge Radahn, wishes to bury your Tainted and prevent you from restoring order to the Lands Between. But the idea that FromSoftware is notoriously difficult souls-how could be cute sent YouTuber Kevin “Flurdeh” Hensen on a quest to reinvent the game as a charming, isometric, claymation-like CRPG, and the results are stunning. I would totally play that.

Flurdeh is a video editor whose work on YouTube mainly focuses on bringing out the beauty of video games. This regularly involves “tilt shifting” a game’s camera to change perspective, often aiming for an isometric look Hades or CRPGs like Disco Elysium and the original Stand out. Flurdeh has done this a few times with other games including Last days and Red Dead Redemption 2and the end result is usually beautiful stop-motion-like animation that would feel right at home alongside a Tim Burton short film.

Use camera tools created by software engineer and photomode modder Frans Bouma, Flurdeh now has tilt shifted elden ring. Instead of the usual third-person perspective camera that follows behind your tainted, Flurdeh’s reimagining positioned the lens high above the action, turning the Lands Between into a beautiful miniature landscape.

Look how glorious everything is! Terrifying enemies such as Those disgusting giant dogs in Caelid and what seems to be Glitter Stone Dragon Adula, look almost approachable in their natural habitats. That Turtle Pope just hanging around. Even the infamous ones tree guard doesn’t look that threatening. The Lands Between is not a cozy place, but Flurdeh’s animation gives them such a feeling.

said Flurdeh kotaku a bit about how he created the animation and explains that the inspiration for changing the perspective of games came from tilt-shifted photographs he saw online in 2015.

“There were a few examples of images that made real buildings, cars, and people look like toys,” Flurdeh said. “I’m also interested in in-game/virtual photography, so over the years I’ve tried to reproduce the effect in games, which eventually led to making videos out of it. Most of the illusion of the effect comes from the angle and depth of view, so I experimented a lot with it until I found the right look. Then we accelerated the footage and removed certain frames from the videos to make it look like toys in a stop motion animation.”

Continue reading: elden ring: That kotaku Verification

While Flurdeh has changed tons of games in the past, he’s always looking to experiment with upcoming releases, including a very specific Bethesda version.

“Sometimes the effect just doesn’t work on a game and I have to keep going,” Flurdeh said. “It’s far away, though starfield is the first [that comes] I’m interested in trying this with. I’m almost always working on the miniaturization of already released games like e.g BioShock and mirror edge although.”

I imagine tilt-shifted elden ring harder than the game already is. Being so far removed from the frantic action and making everything look so tiny would make reading an enemy’s movements almost impossible. But there’s no denying that it’s a cute way of reimagining FromSoft’s dark fantasy world.